Digital Photography School generates revenue by selling courses and ebooks.

If your audience loves you so much and you can’t figure out a way to generate revenue, ask for donations.

ProPublica, an independent news site focused on investigative journalism, generates some of its revenue from donations from people who want to keep it going. People donate to Charity Water because their stories are so good.

You can also sell an ongoing subscription to content, just as CMI sells a subscription to their training program and we have the Social Media Marketing Society.

Create a subscription or training program like Content Marketing University.

I ask how people can begin using Joe’s model without becoming overwhelmed by all of these ways to monetize content.

Joe advises that you don’t do everything at once.

Try one revenue model every six months and start with the lowest-hanging fruit. That’s generally some type of sponsorship.

To get a sponsorship, you first need to have a decent audience size.

For example, Joe took about two years to grow his list to 10,000 people before he started to monetize.

When you’re ready to look for a sponsor who wants to reach your audience, do a Google search on the keywords that fit your audience to find people who are buying pay-per-click advertising or those in your niche doing promoted posts on Facebook.

Then put together a sponsorship package.

After you start advertising sponsorships, look to your audience for the next thing.

Talk to them. Read their emails. Figure out what’s missing in your industry.

Is there a gap for an event of some kind?

Is there a gap where people would pay for premium content in a subscription or ebook?

Is there an opportunity to ultimately sell a product or service because your audience loves you so much?

People wondered how BuzzFeed was going to monetize because it’s hard to sell advertising.